Because of the strong Typhoon Vongfong?

Toei Animation's highly-anticipated film HappinessCharge PreCure! Ningyou no Kuni no Ballerina (The ballerina in the doll kingdom), the feature film version of the on-going TV anime HappinessCharge PreCure! and the 17th feature film in the PreCure franchise, was finally released on 210 screens across Japan last weekend. Though it had 11 more screens, it bombed at the box office earning less than half of last year's Dokidoki! PreCure film, which opened on October 26, 2013, with 199 screens.

The HappinessCharge film took fifth place at the weekend box office with 100,389,600 yen (about US$936,000) on 85,396 ticket sales. They were catastrophic 53% and 56% drops from those of the Dokidoki film, which opened at second place with 21,3410,200 yen on 191,918 tickets in its first weekend. The total gross of the Dokidoki! film was about 950 million yen.

The biggest reason of its disappointing result was no doubt Typhoon Vongfong, this year's strongest storm

hit Japan, equivalent to a category 5 hurricane. It churned through Japan last weekend, leaving two men

killed, another remains missing, and at least 96 people were injured in 23 prefectures. Even in my

prefecture Kochi, all of the public transportation stopped on Sunday due to strong wind and rain.

Unfortunately for the HappinessCharge film, not so many parents wanted to take their children to movie

theaters in the awfully bad weather condition. As I wrote, the film itself was really good, probably one of the

best non-All Stars films. Let's see how it can do in the second week in much better weather.